Geo-enthusiasts from all over the map are gathering on the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus this weekend (June 2-3) for WhereCamp.

WhereCamp is a free “unconference” focusing on all things geographical and cartographical. This informal meeting of minds welcomes all geo-enthusiasts, from Web 2.0 and mobile developers to social place hackers, artists, grad students, geographers, earth scientists and anybody else who wants to “know their place.”

While the conversations could take many directions, participants may decide to discuss topics like social cartography, software and hardware, context awareness, mobile development, “geeks-with-conscience” kinds of discussions, humanitarian mapping efforts, food webs and local food transparency, psychogeography, geo-games, and place hacking.

Coming together over the weekend between two popular conferences (Where 2.0 and Digital Earth) — and most likely drawing lots of people in town for both — WhereCamp promises to be well-attended and full of lively discussion.

WhereCamp kicks-off at 10:00 am Saturday morning, June 2, (arrive earlier for breakfast!) with quick intros and session planning. Once everyone is on the same page, the events and festivities will go straight through to Sunday evening.

Attendees are invited to bring a sleeping bag and spend the night chatting away on the spacious Yahoo! lawn. Food will be served, thanks to generous sponsors.

Sign up if you can on the WhereCamp Wiki so they can plan ahead, or just swing by for this free event. Of course, you can check out all the event details on Upcoming!

Leonard Lin
Hack Guy and Upcoming.org Co-Founder

The Internet has given voice to millions of people’s political, social, and even spiritual passions. We might visit their sites every day, but what do we know about the people behind them?

Today we’re launching a new series called “People of the Web,” which will explore the stories behind the most interesting people and characters on the Internet.

The series, hosted by veteran journalist Kevin Sites, takes you behind the keyboard to introduce you to people of social significance. You’ll encounter Mike Rogers, a gay blogger who uses the Internet to out closeted politicians he considers hypocritical for working to pass anti-gay legislation, and Kirk Cameron, the former “Growing Pains” star who now runs an evangelical ministry that reaches millions of people online. We spend time with recently imprisoned video blogger Josh Wolf , examining his controversy and questioning whether an activist can also be a journalist. And we meet a 94-year-old Baptist minister and his 35-year-old Burning Man-disciple grandson who started an online hug movement with the site Hug Nation.

Given that last year the same team covered war zones with “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” you might be asking yourself, how did they go from covering global conflicts to covering stories about the Internet? The answer is simple: our goal is to tell interesting stories that aren’t being told. Last year we worked to put a human face on war, and we like to think we did a good job of bringing the important stories about the people within each war zone to our audience. (In fact, the project won several awards including a Webby and the National Headliner Award, and Kevin was awarded the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism.)

This year, we hope to put a human face on the Internet. While there’s certainly plenty of coverage about Internet businesses and technologies, no major news outlets are covering the stories about the people creating followings, controversies or awareness via the Internet. We believe it’s a unique beat and one that’s expanding exponentially — so there’s no shortage of great material.

You’ll notice we’ve integrated MyBlogLog. That’s both so you can connect with more “People of the Web” as well as place yourself in the running as a personality we might profile.

To hear more about this project from Kevin — in his own words — check out a short video we put together. Then let us know what you think of the site.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP, Programming & Development
Yahoo! News & Info

After spending the last 26 years in this fast-paced technology industry, I’ve finally decided it’s time to slow down. I’ll be retiring in early June. After joining tiny little start-ups like Oracle and then Yahoo!, I never imagined things would take off the way they have. And looking back on my eleven years here at Yahoo!, I’m amazed at all that this company has accomplished. Yahoo! has played such a significant role in building the Internet into what it is today and I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of such a talented team.

As I began contemplating retirement, there were a few milestones that I (along with the executive leadership team) wanted to accomplish prior to my departure. We wanted to realign the company and, subsequently, the Technology Group, successfully launch our new search monetization system (a.k.a. Panama), and build a solid technology leadership team to help take this company to the next level. It was very important to me to drive all the way to my last day here at Yahoo! without distractions of an announcement like this. So we chose to make the announcement and my end date as close as possible.

With all this in place now, I know I’m leaving a strong, dedicated, and focused organization that is ready to define the next wave of the Internet revolution. I’m confident that our tech leadership, together with the help of Jerry Yang (who will be acting as the interim executive sponsor of the Technology Group until we identify my permanent replacement) and David Filo, will continue to push the bar on innovation and create services that hundreds of millions of people will use around the world every day.

There is no question that the thing I’ll miss most about Yahoo! is the team and the people that I got to work with every day. The engineering team at Yahoo! is truly world-class and has so much to be proud of. We have engineering leaders here who pioneered things like personalization, developers who created/contribute to open source projects like PHP, scientists who wrote books on search and information retrieval, and hackers who created close to 1,000 applications in the past year alone. With this kind of talent and drive, there’s no telling what this team can accomplish in the years to come.

Yahoo! is not the kind of company you can just retire from and forget about. It’s more than just using the products everyday or having your kids proud to tell their friends where Dad worked. It’s about being part of something much larger than yourself and being on that ride with an incredibly passionate team.

One of the hardest things about deciding when to leave is the knowledge that Yahoo! is perpetually preparing to share the next big thing with the world. I will miss being on the inside as those unveilings are readied, but I will be watching with great anticipation from the sidelines and rooting for Yahoo! every step of the way.

Zod Nazem
Chief Technology Office & Head of the Technology Group

A long time ago in a theater far, far away, we were all 30 years younger and just being introduced to droids, wookies, Jedis, fabulous royal hairstyles, and the original evil Empire. May the force be with you as you catch up on our latest adventures.

• Home, home on the range: Yahoo! Real Estate just unveiled an enhanced Home Values section to help you research the perfect home, set the right asking price, or get nosey with your neighbors. With mash-ups from Zillow, eppraisal.com and Reply.com, you can now access multiple valuation estimates, an expanded library of articles and guides from home owning and selling to tax assessments, and mapping tools that pinpoint homes of similar value around the ‘hood. While you’re there, see how your pad compares with the Brady Bunch and Archie Bunker’s house!
• Upcoming at your beck and call: Your Upcoming watchlist now has a home on your mobile phone. You can now see your upcoming events and even your friend’s weekend plans from the road. For you spontaneous types, search for a local event on the fly. Enter “m.upcoming.yahoo.com” on your mobile phone to check it out. More here.
• MyBlogLog gets taggy: MyBlogLog just launched a feature that’s more fun than calling people names. You can now tag MyBlogLog users and their blogs with descriptive tags. Find a spammy blog? Just tag it with “Schmoe” (short for Social Media Optimizer, of course) and the MyBlogLog team will tidy up. They’ll also let you import your Del.icio.us and Technorati tags to get started. More here.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

We’ve just reached an important milestone in our battle against email scammers. Today, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a proposed Internet standard — RFC 4871. That’s bad news for spammers, spoofers, and phishers everywhere.

What is DKIM?

I’m told that not everyone discusses DKIM over their morning brew, so for those few who don’t yet know what DKIM is, here’s the story.

DKIM is an email authentication framework that addresses the widespread issue of email forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. It allows email providers to validate an email’s originating domain, making use of blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also makes phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive domains.

Critically, DKIM is aimed at domain-level authentication, which makes global adoption feasible.

Since email forgery is an issue touching the whole industry, it’s only natural that earlier attempts and experiments have been made in this area, but it’s now widely acknowledged that the cryptographic approach is the best long-term solution and explains why DKIM is the only one to attain Standards Track status.

For nearly 20 years, the bad guys have had an easy way to hide. But now, with widespread adoption of DKIM, we can correct that imbalance. In other words, the bad guys won’t be able to hide for much longer. About time, I reckon.

Who helped?

While DomainKeys started as a technology at Yahoo!, it will only have value if it’s standardized and ubiquitous. And that’s exactly what we’ve been working on for the last three years.

Three years may seem like a long time to some, but in the standards business that’s an incredibly short period that has only been possible due to strong industry collaboration and a lot of hard work by the DKIM Working Group.

Our co-authors at Cisco, PGP and Sendmail obviously provided superior expertise and support over a great period of time. But to be fair, they are just the tip of a very large iceberg of hardworking individuals who helped bring DKIM to fruition. Organizations as diverse as IBM, Earthlink, Microsoft, Spamhaus, Google, PayPal, and Alt-N all had a hand in getting us to this point.

Frankly, it’s hard to think of anyone in the industry who hasn’t helped at some point in time. Did you know that the FTC and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also provided a helping hand? Your tax dollars at work — and well-spent, I must say.

What’s next?

Everything hinges on wide-spread adoption. Now that DKIM is on Standards Track, the hurdle to global adoption has been greatly reduced, but not cleared. I joked earlier that someone might not have heard of DKIM, but the email industry is so big and diverse that evangelizing, education and encouragement are needed to ensure the success of DKIM.

As the largest email provider on the planet, we’re committed to doing everything we can. Fortunately, there are many in our industry working hard every day to make DKIM a success. Our thanks go out to all of those helping, from the largest companies to the smallest open source project. DKIM couldn’t have happened without you.

Most importantly, now that you know about DKIM, you can evangelize, too. Maybe it’s the next topic to share over a cup of joe? It worked wonders for me.

Mark Delany
Chief Architect, inventor of DomainKeys

Once you’ve done your best Crouching Tiger to honor Chow Yun-Fat on his 52nd birthday, come read about some more reasons to scissor-kick across the room!

• Groupie love: Check out your group calendar history at Upcoming by simply clicking “See group history” at the top. No more sifting to the bottom for the most recent events from your fellow social butterflies or choosing between 20 event results or all events. We’ve even added Yahoo! Avatars to group discussions so you can “dress up” for the chat and have members-only discussions (no more random postings from non-members). Read more here.
• Going “glocal”: Yahoo! Maps gets local globally with driving directions in 34 European countries (think road trip in Spain) from U.S. Yahoo! Maps. You’ll notice other changes too like terrain overlays with medium and high zooming options, neighborhood and building footprints for NYC and San Francisco (more cities to come), and directions from points of interest (how about the Golden Gate Bridge or Empire State Building?). No need to look up the address! Read more here.
• Oh me, oh My!: Your My Yahoo! page just got another injection of Ajax and real-time functionality. Now you can add modules or change colors and layout without navigating away from your page. We’ve even added new modules like Yahoo! Calendar (add and delete events as well as skip through days without leaving your page), My Netflix (see new DVDs hot off their cinema run), and an updated Yahoo! Bookmarks module (add and filter bookmarks without leaving My Yahoo!).
• Turning all shades of green: Want to be green, but don’t know how? Newly sprouted site Yahoo! Green is your go-to resource for eco-friendly news, tips, and action plans — planetarians unite! While you’re there, take a pledge against climate change and choose from a variety of actions to reduce your CO2 emissions (air-dry your clothes, carpool with a co-worker, or recycle your cans). You may even win a free fleet of hybrid taxis for your city!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

The second annual (San Francisco) Bay Area Maker Faire opens at the San Mateo Fairgrounds this weekend and Yahoo! will be there. Maker Faire is a family-friendly, hands-on celebration of the DIY spirit, created by O’Reilly Media, publishers of Make and Craft magazines. A two-day festival at the intersection of science, art, technology and fun, Maker Faire is a one-of-a-kind place for passionate hobbyists, backyard tinkerers, grassroots inventors, their friends, fans, and favorite robot companions.

This is Yahoo!’s second year participating as a sponsor and we’ve got all kinds of cool stuff happening at our booth. Jump into the Flickr photo frame and get your Polaroid portrait taken by friendly Flickristas. Or get your hack on with the two winning teams from last fall’s open Hack Day:

• Fashion hackers Diana Eng and Emily Albinski, winners of Hack Day 2006, will be back at the Faire (where we first met them last year) with a ruggedized and redesigned blogging wearable, which you can take for a spin (Saturday and Sunday, every 30 minutes; first come, first served). The Blogging in Motion device will automatically upload photos to a live Flickr photostream as you stroll with it around the Faire. This wearable uses Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s ZoneTag prototype to automatically annotate your photos with a geographic location.
• Uncommon Projects’ Tarikh Korula and Josh Rooke-Ley, the creators of YBox and 2nd place winners at Hack Day, will present four 2-hour workshops over the course of the weekend (Saturday and Sunday, 10:30-12:30 and 2:30-4:30. Sign-ups first come, first served). They’ve designed a custom hardware and software kit for building your own always-on, Internet appliance. The YBox fits in an Altoids tin that attaches to a standard TV set — “like Konfabulator for TV, turning TV into a platform for helpful, easy-to-read, live internet channels.” Eighty Maker Faire attendees will be able to assemble and take home their own YBox at the Faire, while others can watch the action via live video.

Stop by our comfy Internet lounge and discover how Yahoo! can help you be a better builder, crafter, hacker, player, maker. And if you can’t get there, you can armchair-travel with Flickr to relive the weekend afterwards.

More here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/146064/

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

Photo from gwen

Last year, the executive team at Yahoo! made the decision to re-organize the company with one of the central themes being the evolution of a culture from one largely organized around products, to one that is far more organized around our customers. The goal behind the re-org was to help us rationalize and consolidate duplicative products, create greater focus on key priorities, clarify strategic direction, and ultimately develop an environment where we could accelerate the speed and quality of our decision-making. We also wanted to do a better job creating value for our customers, from delighting our consumers with great product experiences to delighting advertisers and publishers by maximizing their ROI when using our products and services.

As part of the realignment, we formed the Yahoo! Network Division, which includes the majority of Yahoo!’s consumer-facing products — our Communications products such as Mail and Messenger; our Community and Social Media properties including Groups, Flickr and Bix; our Search products including Web Search and Answers; the Media properties comprising our News & Information and Entertainment business units; and our Front Doors including the Yahoo.com home page and My Yahoo!.

So, what’s the rationale behind putting all of these assets under one roof? The answer to that question lies no further than our mission statement: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”

In this statement, we not only define our sense of purpose as a company, but also a strategic framework for the Network Division as well. Let me explain further by breaking the mission statement down into its component pieces (and bear with me…this is a bit longer than our average blog post, but it’s an important area of discussion and one we thought was worth the additional detail):

“To connect people…”

If I had to focus on one word that best sums up what we are trying to accomplish in our mission, it’s “connect.” When we talk about connecting people we are specifically talking about connecting our consumers to their most essential needs, connecting our advertisers and publishers to their most valuable consumers, and connecting the dots internally to create far greater efficiencies and fully leverage the company’s strengths. Speaking of connecting dots internally, our recent product announcements regarding closing Yahoo! Photos and Yahoo! Auctions in the U.S. and Canada represent a clear indication that we have begun to do so in earnest. And it’s not just about rationalizing existing product lines — it’s also about better leveraging and integrating the powerful assets we’ve got (e.g. Flickr integration into Yahoo! Search).

“…to their passions…”

While “passions” may initially strike you as one of those feel good, corporate-speak words, it’s important to understand that there is a lot of science that goes into truly making connecting people to their passions a reality. If we are going to be successful at this endeavor, it means we’ll not only need to understand the intentions of our users, but also leverage the fundamental technologies to make this possible. Fortunately, we have spent the last few years building what is arguably the most relevant search engine on the Web (seriously…and before you say it, when was the last time you compared?) :) and have most recently leveraged our core competency in matching technologies into our new and vastly improved search engine marketing system, a.k.a. “Panama.”

The key going forward will be to continue to expand these technologies to virtually every pixel we can improve on the Yahoo! Network. In other words, we want to connect the right user to the right content at the right time. If we get this right, the implications are considerable. Consider that the one-size-fits-all content featured on most web sites clicks at only a fraction of the top algorithmic results in web search. Why? Because we know exactly what you are looking for when you do a query. However, for the most part we can only do our best to anticipate what you want when you are browsing your favorite property. The goal is to close that gap, and ultimately make your content browsing experience as fundamentally relevant as your web search experience. This is a lofty ambition, and probably more vision than mission, but it’s a worthy one, and one of the highest priorities for the Network team today.

“…their communities…”

In a day and age where discussion on the Web inevitably turns to the rising influence of community and social media, connecting people to their communities may on the surface appear to be the most straightforward component of our mission statement. For the most part, we all intuitively understand the power of community and how the communities we participate in, online and offline, create value in our day-to-day lives.

While communities have and will always continue to play a central role in creating value on the Yahoo! Network (e.g. Groups, Flickr, Answers, Bix — and stay tuned for the next gen of products in this area), when we talk about connecting people to their communities, strategically we are talking about creating better user experiences not simply by knowing what you want, but also by leveraging who you know. This dynamic has traditionally manifested itself when you use products like the Yahoo! Mail address book or Yahoo! Messenger contact list. However, with our rapidly expanding number of properties facilitating connections between people in various contextual environments, an entirely new world of possibilities is introduced. In addition to developing some exciting new community products to help make this happen, we’re also building out our research ranks to include some of the most renowned social scientists in the world to help us further develop these capabilities.

“…and the world’s knowledge.”

When people first hear the word “knowledge” in the context of Yahoo!, they may immediately think Yahoo! Search or Yahoo! Answers. However, consider that virtually everything we do on the Network results in finding, using, sharing or expanding information or knowledge in some way or another. Communication applications like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger facilitate the ability for people to connect and exchange knowledge. As described above, our community assets do the same. Our news & information properties such as News, Finance, and Sports are all about the exchange of information and knowledge, and our entertainment assets like Movies, TV, Music, and Games also facilitate the exchange of knowledge around those activities (i.e. the best shows to watch or music to listen to).

Our goal is to tie these underlying stores of knowledge together wherever and whenever it might be useful for you. In other words, we want to leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web. One of the things we’re most excited about is the concept of “open,” and all of the potential we have yet to tap by opening up some of the most trafficked pages on Yahoo.com to the highest quality publishers on the Web, regardless of their size. (Though bear in mind, the more scalable your infrastructure, the better. Our front page reaches over 40 million unique users per day — that’s a whole lot of attention to be channeling to your servers. Stay tuned for more on this soon…)

So there it is: our corporate mission as a strategic framework for the Network Division. It’s a mission and strategy that not only governs our big picture in terms of where we want to go, but also our day-to-day in terms of how we’re going to get there. As I’m sure you’d agree, at the end of the day, any strategy, no matter how good it sounds in theory, is only as valuable as its ability to be executed. With the re-org now behind us, and a clear sense of where we want to go in place, our attention is now very much focused on connecting the dots, creating value for our customers, and making this strategy a reality.

Jeff Weiner
EVP Yahoo! Network Division

As promised, we’ve started to roll out unlimited email storage to Yahoo! Mail users worldwide today. When it hits your account, you’ll notice the storage meter has disappeared — meaning, you just don’t have to worry about deleting old messages ever again!

As a reminder, while we wish we could simply flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone at once, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition. Thanks for your patience.

Happy emailing!

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

Shrinking ice caps. Vanishing species. Extreme weather patterns. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the dire evidence supporting global climate change. It leaves you wondering if an individual can have any impact at all on slowing this train.

We think so.

Later this morning, with actor Matt Dillon and Global Green USA CEO Matt Petersen in New York City’s Times Square, we will launch a national call-to-action that invites people across the country to get involved, become aware and take action. We’re calling it “Be a Better Planet,” and we’re issuing a challenge to find the greenest city in America. Not in the sense of which is most energy efficient or least polluting, but which city is filled with the most eco-minded residents. We’ll reward that city with a fleet of hybrid taxis (or cash equivalent for city greening projects with Global Green USA). And we’ll reward you with a free CFL bulb (while supplies last).

To participate, all you need to do is go here and do one or more of the following:

1. Answer a question on Yahoo! Answers (and take your shot at answering Matt Dillon’s question while you’re at it about the most effective yet simple ways people can save energy);
2. Go to Yahoo! oneSearch on your mobile phone to type in green keywords like “organic food” and “public transport” plus your zip code to find relevant local resources; and
3. Pledge to take up to about 30 different planet-protecting actions in order to reduce your personal carbon emissions and track them on an interactive U.S. map to see the collective impact of everyone else who takes part.

That last point leads me to this bit of news. Coinciding with this event, we’re giving you a sneak preview of a brand new site called Yahoo! Green that we hope will become your go-to resource for all topics green. Its anchor tenant will be the green pledge. In a matter of a week or so, the site will also be full of green news headlines; featured content from Global Green USA, Environmental Defense, NRDC and Lime; blog feeds from environmental authority Amory Lovins, Environmental Defense’s chief scientist Bill Chameides and EcoGeek; green shopping tips; the 18Seconds.org site; and relevant content from Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and the Yahoo! Autos Green Center. And it’ll evolve from there with even more content and features, all in the name of informing and empowering you to be as green as you can be. The site was designed and built by our Yahoo! For Good Scrum team, an internal sabbatical program for employees who want to use their talents to do some good for the world.

I think I speak for Yahoos around the world when I say we’re very concerned about the future of our planet. And we think it’s time to stop talking about global warming and start doing something about it. Small individual actions can add up to significant change. Tell your friends, coworkers, parents, mailman… imagine what difference it would make if 300 million Americans (and 6.2 billion non-Americans, for that matter) started thinking differently about everything they do.

Think your city is the greenest of them all? Go prove it. We’re rooting for you.

David Filo
Chief Yahoo